Apify has partnered with Coinbase to enable autonomous AI agents to discover, pay for, and run its web automation Actors without needing an Apify account, subscription, or API key. This integration utilizes x402, the payment protocol Coinbase formalized from the long-reserved HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. It addresses a significant gap in agent autonomy: while an agent could plan a task and call an API, it previously couldn't sign up for or pay for a service, necessitating human intervention. With x402, agents can independently settle payments, allowing work to proceed seamlessly.

The process is straightforward. An agent sends a request to an Actor, receives an HTTP 402 response, authorizes a USDC micropayment from a wallet on the Base network, and the Actor executes the task. Settlement uses a stablecoin, ensuring one dollar remains equivalent to one dollar without volatility. Billing is pay-per-result, meaning the agent purchases a prepaid token and pays only for the usage they consume, avoiding the commitment to a plan. The most efficient method pairs the Coinbase Agentic Wallet CLI with a direct HTTP call to the Actor endpoint, in which the agent handles the 402 response. The same Actors are also accessible through the Apify MCP server and a client that automatically provisions a wallet.

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At launch, around 20,000 of Apify's Pay Per Event Actors are callable through x402, increasing the number of tools on the protocol from approximately 2,000 to over 20,000. For agents, the cost of real work remains low. About one dollar can cover nearly 350 Google Maps listings, 430 Instagram profiles, or 110 trending TikTok videos in a single run. Since x402 is an open protocol governed by the Linux Foundation, the same method can be applied across the broader agentic economy rather than being limited to a single vendor endpoint.

Apify Actors are cloud programs designed for web scraping and browser automation, covering search, profile collection, and structured data extraction across major platforms. Most x402 services to date have been single, purpose-built endpoints, so opening a community-driven marketplace of this scale to agents in one step provides the ecosystem with a long tail of ready tools it previously lacked. The target audience includes teams building autonomous agents, developer tools, and internal copilots that need to access live web data and act on it without requiring human approval at each step.

Apify operates a platform and marketplace for web automation, where developers can publish and monetize Actors that other builders, and now agents, can run on demand. The company positions itself as the first and largest marketplace of web automation tools for agents on x402. Coinbase provides the protocol layer, transforming a status code that had been unused since the early days of the web into a functional standard for machine-to-machine payments. Together, this initiative places a vast catalog of web tools within the pay-per-call model that autonomous agents need to operate end-to-end.